


tell my heart that yes is no

by poppyseedheart



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Bodyswap, Demon Shane Madej, First Kiss, Getting Together, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 11:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14448768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poppyseedheart/pseuds/poppyseedheart
Summary: “How did this even happen?”Shane sighs, smiles ruefully. “You know how I keep asking demons to rip me out of my body?”“You’re fucking kidding me.”/Due to some demonic shenanigans, Ryan and Shane swap bodies. They learn a lot about both themselves and each other in the process.





	tell my heart that yes is no

**Author's Note:**

> Oh hey, second fic in this fandom! Big love to the writer's discord for this week's prompt roulette, which I followed sorta almost closely, and that in and of itself is a cause for celebration for me.
> 
> Many thanks to Gray, who helped me figure out how I wanted to plot this out and enthusiastically encouraged me to finish this! You're the best <3
> 
> I hope you all enjoy this lil fic, which is half fun romp and half occult secrets :)

Ryan has never been a demon before. He is very, very sure of this. It wasn’t a thought that really occurred to him before this morning, but it’s suddenly become incredibly pressing, because he’s not only about six inches taller than he was the night before, but he also has _ink black eyes_.

The sunrise is sweet, painting gold and pink shades of light across Shane’s apartment, and Ryan looks into the bathroom mirror to find that his face is Shane’s face, but it’s wrong. It’s sharper, angrier, and the eyes are freaking him the fuck out. He screams, not sparing a single thought to how Shane would make fun of him if he found out Ryan’s first instinct upon seeing something like this was to freak out. Anyone would freak out. It’s horrifying.

So yeah, of course he screams. It only takes half a second before the mirror shatters, which just makes him scream more.

All things told, it takes almost half an hour for him to calm down enough to get his bearings. First, he confirms that this is, in fact, Shane’s apartment. The nightstand is covered in little notes Shane appears to have written to himself, reminders about work and scraps of research for upcoming scripts, so that all checks out. Shane’s phone is sitting on the bathroom counter, plugged into the charger, and Ryan thinks he might be able to do something with it until he realizes he doesn’t actually know Shane’s passcode. It’s strange, to think that they spend so much time together but so many things about Shane are still obscured.

For lack of anything better to do, he closes his eyes as he gets dressed and makes himself a cup of coffee. Both he and Shane have to be at work in forty-five minutes.

 _Please, please let Shane be in my body_ , thinks Ryan. Any alternative is far too terrifying to even consider.

He goes through the rest of the motions, hoping blindly that he’s grabbed all of the things Shane needs at work, and is about to start walking to the office when Shane’s phone rings. His own face appears on the screen, some silly picture that Shane made his contact image almost three years ago now.

He almost drops the phone with how fast he fumbles to answer it. “Hello?” he asks, then makes a face at his own voice, which is Shane’s voice. God, this whole thing is messed up.

“Ryan?” It’s his own voice, but the intonation is different. The thread of anxiety in it is familiar, though.

“Shane?”

A relieved sigh from the other end of the line. “It’s you. Good. That makes this easier.”

Ryan checks the time and leaves the apartment begrudgingly. “Makes what easier?” he hisses.

“I’ll explain everything at work. Just be on time, I’m still gunning for Employee of the Month.”

Ryan can’t tell if he’s joking or not. Regardless, that’s so completely not the point that his mind boggles. “Employee of the- Shane, are you a _demon_? That’s a serious question, by the way. Your eyes did this thing when I woke up and I’m really fucking freaked out and not convinced this is all real, honestly.”

“Like I said,” Shane explains patiently with Ryan’s voice, “I’ll tell you everything. Just get to the office. I’ve been here for fifteen minutes doing nothing and people are staring.”

Ryan has so many questions that his brain short circuits and he decides to ask exactly none of them, instead hanging up the phone with a vindictive press of his finger. He must look a little unhinged, not least because walking like Shane is _hard_ when there’s this much leg to manage, but whatever. Whatever! This is all probably a really vivid dream, so fuck it.

It’s with this attitude that Ryan enters the office and finds Shane sitting there with headphones, bobbing his head and listening to Ryan’s Spotify playlist for Unsolved.

He taps his own body’s shoulder, which is dressed haphazardly, and Shane pretends to fall out of his chair. “Sorry,” he says, doing something spectacularly strange with his voice, “you startled me!”

“You dick, I do not sound like that.”

Shane shrugs. “You do a little.”

Ryan pinches the bridge of his nose. There’s a wrongness to it that he hates. “You said you would explain, so explain.”

“I will if you put those horns away, buddy.” Shane has gone very serious very quickly, standing and guiding Ryan away from the middle of the office by an elbow. “I booked a meeting room. I was worried something like this would happen.”

“Horns?” Ryan blinks, still feeling a beat behind, and reaches an arm up slowly toward his head.

Shane bats it away impatiently. “Yes, demon boy. C’mon, this isn’t the place. Think about rainbows or something, sunshine, kittens. Or think about how right you are about the supernatural.”

“I’d really rather not think about that,” says Ryan, feeling vaguely seasick. 

They enter the room Shane booked, complete with its rolling chairs and shiny whiteboard, and Ryan finds a wall and backs up against it, jolting when the top of his shoulder bumps the corner of the framed motivational poster he never had to avoid before. His breathing quickens, and his vision starts to blur.

“Uh,” says Shane, “are you having a panic attack?”

Ryan shakes his head, then nods, then shakes it again. “I think so,” he guesses, sliding down the wall until he’s sitting on the floor with his back against it. “Your body feels weird. Different.” It takes a bit to get it out between gasps, but he does it.

“I’ve never had one before,” says Shane quietly, sitting on the floor next to Ryan. “I didn’t realize my body could even do that.” Ryan flips him off with a shaky hand, and Shane huffs a startled laugh. “The horns are gone, at least.”

“Oh,” says Ryan, starting to come down from it already. Shane’s body seems better at drifting back to balance, like it exists in the middle where Ryan is used to veering between extremes when he’s upset. It’s nice, if unfamiliar. “That’s good.”

Shane bumps their shoulders together very lightly, like he’s testing the waters, and Ryan leans into it so their arms are touching. It’s grounding, and some of the tension leaves his hands where he’d been compulsively flexing them in his lap. He wants some reassurance, or at least a hug, but he’ll settle for answers instead.

“So,” says Ryan. “You’re a demon.”

Shane nods, a quick bob of his head. “Yup.”

“And you were possessing this body? Am _I_ possessing this body?”

“Not exactly. I was borrowing it, and along the way it became mine. It was a long time ago,” he adds. Shane can be quiet a lot of the time, but rarely is he solemn like this. “I live on Earth, basically as a human. I have the demon look, but it’s a lot less prominent these days, and I don’t commute from Hell or anything. I even started aging again a few years ago, so. Happy days.”

Ryan nods like he understands. He does, a little, but not enough to feel comfortable in this body. “But you _could_ go to Hell. If you wanted to, I mean.”

“I guess. I’d stop aging, though.”

“And you don’t want to?”

“I want to feel human.” Shane sounds small now, his borrowed shoulders hunching in on themselves. “Can we talk about this after we’ve swapped back? You hold yourself really tightly, I have no idea how you deal with this every day.”

There it is. Ryan’s been waiting for the quip, and this one is half-hearted but it’s better than the despondent edge to Shane’s voice that keeps trying to creep into this conversation. “How did this even happen?”

Shane sighs, smiles ruefully. “You know how I keep asking demons to rip me out of my body?”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“Nope! I forgot how literally some of them take things.”

Ryan groans. “So how do we fix it? And how do we stop this kind of thing from happening again?” As soon as he says it, he realizes the implication is that they’ll keep trucking along with Unsolved like business as usual, but he finds that he’s not that worried about it. His entire life has turned upside down in the last few hours, and maybe it’ll hit him later, but for now he’s perfectly okay pretending things are going to be normal.

There’s a knock on the door then, and the both startle. “You guys about done in there? We need a whiteboard for a quick bit.”

“Yeah,” says Ryan, trying to keep this voice even. He stands up, then helps pull Shane up—a role reversal that almost makes him laugh. Outside, a couple of producers are standing around and looking harried. “All yours.”

When they get back to their desks, Shane just says, “Come over to my apartment later.”

Ryan blinks. “Mine yours? Or yours yours?”

“The one I pay rent for,” answers Shane. The corner of his mouth twitches like he’s trying not to smile. “Also can we switch desks? I have editing to do. If anyone asks we’ll just say it’s for a video or something.”

Ryan agrees quickly, eager to get back to his research, and they swap seats. In the hours that populate the rest of the work day, he can almost lose himself in the moment, only remembering the situation every time the video he’s working on goes dark and the black screen reflects his own face back at him, wrong, beautiful, something that cannot go on as it exists.

From the corner of his eye, he sees Shane blink at his screen every once in a while, like he’s remembering, too.

The work day, warped by Ryan’s impatience, feels like it takes forever to end, but it does end eventually.

He and Shane split a rideshare to Shane’s apartment, and Ryan taps his foot anxiously the whole way there.

…

They end up in the living room with two open beers sitting untouched on the coffee table. At first, alcohol had seemed like a great idea, but the thought of consuming libations in a body that doesn’t belong to him immediately made him queasy. By the way Shane had left his drink there, too, he thinks they might be on the same page.

“So,” says Shane, “there are a few ways to fix this, but most of them you won’t like.”

“Try me,” answers Ryan, braver than he feels.

Shane cocks an eyebrow. “You could come with me to Hell, and we could get it settled there.”

Ryan can’t tell if he’s joking or not, but after everything today he’s leaning toward _not_ , and the room spins for a moment. “No thanks,” he says, and it sounds like it’s coming from very far away. Like his body is not his body. Like no body is his body, and he’s drifting.

“I figured,” says Shane. “A way to cheat the system, so to speak, could be to confuse our souls.”

“Confuse our souls,” Ryan repeats flatly.

Shane laughs and it sounds nervous. He runs a hand through his hair, and it sticks up all weird in the front. “It could mean a lot of things,” he hedges, “but it usually means, uh- intimate touch. It has to be consensual,” he rushes to clarify, “and both parties have to be into it enough that the edges of the souls start to intermingle. That’s the easiest way, but there are others, too.”

Ryan’s breath catches. “We have to sleep together?”

“Oh,” says Shane, and he laughs again, this time less nervous. “Oh, no, sorry. Just kissing is fine.”

“Okay.”

“So that’s one option, or we could also try to meditate for long enough that we start to transcend physical form, but that takes—”

“I said okay,” interrupts Ryan. His ears feel hot, but he’s certain about this. “You wanna?”

Shane nods, but his mouth twists. “Even knowing what I am?”

Shane is a demon who is trying to be human. Shane has ink black eyes, and horns, and he can communicate with other demonic entities. He’s been to Hell and back, and is protective of his body and his life here. Where most people Ryan knows would celebrate immortality, Shane is excited about the fact that he’s aging. That he can _die_. And, above everything, the Shane Ryan knows is a good person, demon or not. Ryan has been half in love with him practically since they met, and somehow, _somehow_ , this revelation doesn’t change that. Ryan has always been the kind of person that goes with his gut, and he knows what he wants.

Plus, this gives Ryan bragging rights for the rest of his life. Hell yeah. 

“Even then,” says Ryan, smiling.

They draw together slowly. It’s more careful than it might be otherwise, both of them still getting used to existing in these bodies in space. Ryan is holding his breath when their lips finally touch.

There’s something exploratory to it, searching, seeking. The angle is strange, and Ryan keeps thinking about how weird it is to be kissing himself—is he a good kisser? Is this weird because they’re in the wrong bodies, or is Ryan’s body just bad at kissing? This isn’t _bad,_ but what if he’s just more forgiving because he’s biased?—and then the angle changes and Ryan gets one blissful moment where he’s not thinking about anything at all before a surge of energy blasts into the space between them and throws Ryan across the room.

“Holy shit,” he says. His head had cracked into the plaster, and the scene spins when he opens his eyes. 

Shane laughs from the opposite end of the room. “Unholy shit is probably closer, but I agree.”

When everything stops spinning quite so much, Ryan gets his bearings, and Shane’s figure comes back into focus. He’s lanky as ever, sitting there smug and firmly in his own body, and Ryan is so relieved to be back to being five foot ten that he starts to laugh too. “That was the worst kiss in history.”

Shane looks down at himself, then back up at Ryan. “It worked, so the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.”

“Okay, it was fine before we got blasted away from each other.”

“Energy,” says Shane solemnly.

“Yes, obviously. You could’ve warned me I’d end up mildly concussed.”

Shane doesn’t even look worried, the asshole. “I didn’t know,” he says, holding up his hands in mock surrender, as if absolving himself of responsibility for the entire fiasco. “I haven’t exactly done a body switcheroo before, and I definitely haven’t solved it like that.”

“What, you haven’t made out with all your demon friends?”

“I mean, I guess. Years ago. It never meant anything with them,” says Shane, quick like he’s trying to tilt it flippant but can’t quite get there.

Something quiets in Ryan. “But I’m special,” he answers, because he’s never known how to stop reaching for Shane.

“Yeah.” It’s barely more than a breath.

“If I kiss you again, we won’t switch back, will we?”

Shane shakes his head.

Ryan stands up, crosses the room, and crouches down over Shane’s awkward form, where he’d landed limbs akimbo after the blast of energy that threw them apart. He tilts Shane’s chin up, and Shane’s eyes are glossy black. Ryan shudders but doesn’t pull away from him. “I’m a little scared of you,” he admits, “but I think I like you enough that it’s okay.”

There’s no time to register Shane’s reaction, because in the span of a heartbeat he’s being tugged down by the neck and they’re kissing again, and it’s so much better this time. Ryan’s eyes stay shut, and Shane is frightening and a demon and also completely familiar. 

He’s easy banter, staying after hours together in solidarity when one of them is working on a particularly arduous edit, grocery shopping and bar hopping and all of the times Ryan wanted to hold his hand but figured he was alone in the wanting. To think they could have been doing this for longer makes Ryan want to weep at the lost time. 

He’s reaching for Shane. He’s been reaching.

His heart pounding hard in his chest, he winds a hand into Shane’s hair and holds on.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at teamokdynamite, and on twitter at poppyseedheart!


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